Setting or Mechanic

[Wik]

While good setting, poor mechanics suck, as do great mechanics, crappy setting... I have to say, when I buy games, the ones I always get excited about are the ones with great setting, and okay or better mechanics.

Earthdawn, for example - it's not really the step die mechanics that make me love it, for example. My favourite RPG product, d20 Apocalypse, is my favourite almost entirely because of the implied setting, even though most of the book is "crunch" and doesn't, in fact, have much in the way of defined "Setting".

 

[Jack7]

My setting is uneven in quality but it doesn't matter because I run character-based drama, not exploration.

To me character based drama and setting exploration are not mutually exclusive (not saying you said they were, but I'm using your comment to build upon) at all, but to me the very best setting are one's in which the setting exploration is a mirror image, or a correlation to the character exploration.

It's not Either/Or, but setting reflects what the characters find out about themselves, and what the characters discover about themselves is reflected in the setting/world/milieu.

And in a really superb setting the characters can remake the world in their own image, and the world will force them to utilize dormant parts of themselves to change both the world and themselves.

Because the characters and the world are really just different aspects of the same thing at a different scale.

 

[Ahnehnois]

To me character based drama and setting exploration are not mutually exclusive (not saying you said they were, but I'm using your comment to build upon) at all, but to me the very best setting are one's in which the setting exploration is a mirror image, or a correlation to the character exploration.

The point I'm making here is not that setting is completely irrelevant, but that to me, the only aspects of setting that matter are the ones that directly affect the characters. It also matters that the aspects that are used have an organic quality to them and feel real rather than contrived for a game.

That said, I just ran a campaign where 95% of the world was never mapped, most of the major cultures and power centers were never explained, and even the character's own backgrounds were detailed only in a very limited fashion. The success of the campaign rested far more on the rules choices I made than on the setting aspects I established. I could have held it in a desert instead of a jungle or with dwarves in place of humans and it would have been the same, but if the rules for how characters die and how resurrection works were a little different, it would have failed. That's my model. I spend a lot more time writing houserules than writing specific NPCs or similar material, and I spend a lot more time writing specific NPCs then I do on general worldbuilding. I'd much rather improvise setting than rules.

I also think that for the broader health of the hobby, it's very important that people run games that are diverse, so that the players who play them will be as well. If everyone, or even a large minority of people play in Greyhawk (or Golarion, Points of Light, et al.) the game stagnates. So I believe an rpg should be a strong rules-based core with a weak setting just to create examples to explain the rules (which is what Greyhawk was for 3e) and with a diverse set of optional settings for those who can't or won't (for various reasons) create their own. Despite my general support of Pathfinder, I think their "one setting fits all" approach may be good business, but it's creatively a problem. So in this sense, I think that setting is an important issue, but I don't think that a particular setting does (or should) define an rpg.

 

[saskganesh]

I'm primarily a DM, but I also play. At this point in my life, after 30 years of on and off participation in the hobby, my mantra is not to let the mechanics get in the way of the game. So I'm picking setting -- I want immersion. So while a good system helps create immersion, the wrong system means we are playing the rulebook instead of focussing on the shared world created by the DM and players.

 

[Sadrik]

The point I'm making here is not that setting is completely irrelevant, but that to me, the only aspects of setting that matter are the ones that directly affect the characters. It also matters that the aspects that are used have an organic quality to them and feel real rather than contrived for a game.

I actually don't agree with this but it is a very fine point. If the characters get word that two nations have gone to war in the south and the characters are in the north and it really does not affect them, I submit it affects the feel of the game even though it does not affect the mechanics or even the choices the players make for their characters. It is a bit flighty of a concept but it goes to the point of immersion within the game.

That said, I just ran a campaign where 95% of the world was never mapped, most of the major cultures and power centers were never explained, and even the character's own backgrounds were detailed only in a very limited fashion. The success of the campaign rested far more on the rules choices I made than on the setting aspects I established. I could have held it in a desert instead of a jungle or with dwarves in place of humans and it would have been the same, but if the rules for how characters die and how resurrection works were a little different, it would have failed.

It would be an entirely different feel if they were dwarves than humans. The mechanical changes may have made little mechanical difference but the difference in feel because of the dwarven tropes would be very strong.

That's my model. I spend a lot more time writing houserules than writing specific NPCs or similar material, and I spend a lot more time writing specific NPCs then I do on general worldbuilding. I'd much rather improvise setting than rules.

House rules and setting specific rules provide a lot of feel for the game and seek to define the setting. If elves live for ever in your game is that a setting change or is that a mechanical rule. It is both. So it may be hard to say mechanics are more important when you can really classify these types of house rules as setting addendum. If you changes how attacks of opportunity work for your game I see that more as a house rule that really is not a setting specific change. That is how I see it in my mind anyway.

 

[Bluenose]

In my observation, no matter how interesting and entertaining the setting reads, rules that are clunky or give results which differ from what the 'fiction' suggests should happen mean that the game won't be as enjoyable. Get the mechanics right, and a rather ordinary setting can give a fun game.

 

[Verdande]

Mechanics.

I've yet to play in somebody's else's setting and I've always created my own, but it's a lot harder to come up with a good ruleset.

If you get the mechanics right, you can emulate whatever kind of fiction you like. If you try and graft, say, Dungeons and Dragons onto a spy thriller, you're going to get the totally wrong result (and please don't bring up Spycraft, changing out 90% of the systems hardly counts as the same game).

 

[Agamon]

I have to admit, I didn't answer the poll as it pertains to D&D. When I choose to run a game, the setting comes first. Then I decide among the myriad games avaliable as to which set of mechanics I want to use to make that setting work.

So, what is most important to me is setting (though, only because I choose it first, it's important that the mechanics I choose later work with that setting). If we're talking about one specific game, like D&D, then it's mechanics, because that's how I choose the system I'm going to use to represent the game I want to play.

 

[Mark CMG]

I think it is best to have a core system that is relatively setting-free (though not necessarily genre-free) then have easily integrated additional mechanics that can tie a setting (or settings) to that system.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Mechanics. A bad setting can be fixed. And a good setting, that doesn't happen to do what you want, has to be reworked or replaced with something else, anyway. It is more difficult to fix bad mechanics.

That said, there are diminishing returns. Once your mechanics are "good enough," then improvements to a relatively poor setting are likely to give better reward for the effort, than spending that time on marginal mechanical improvement.

Plus, the setting often illustrates the mechanics. If it does a poor job of doing that, especially the spirit of the mechanics, then the mechanics must be that much better to compensate.